Cane absent from ‘historic’ school reality show
In 2003 a new reality TV show That’ll Teach ’Em launched in Britain. The idea was to put thirty 16-year-old pupils into a 1950s-style boarding school for a month. But as Kevin Myers in the Daily Telegraph noted it wouldn’t be realistic because there’s no corporal punishment.
It won’t be the old school without the agony
The next stage in “reality”
television starts tomorrow on Channel Four. That’ll Teach ’Em will put
30 16-year-old pupils and nine teachers into a “1950s” boarding school for a
month. The programme's producer, Simon Rockell, said: “We are creating the
whole school world – the religion, the games, the food.”
Well, “the whole school
world” is precisely what the programme won’t be creating, because vital to that
world, and without which all the rules and the regulations are quite
meaningless, is the teenage culture of that time. To impose rules from over 40
years ago on young minds today is as useful as trying to feed hay to cars. I
should know: I caught the last days of the old English public school.
The fons et origo [the
source or origin] of authority in that system – corporal punishment – will be
absent from the series in spite of cane-flexing publicity photographs. This is
Hamlet without Prince, Ophelia and Queen Gertrude. For corporal punishment was
not only the ultimate sanction in the school: it was also the deciding arbiter
of school culture. Boys expected to be beaten, and how one took one’s beating
was a measure of one’s manhood. We certainly didn’t think it unfair: quite the
reverse. That was the system – arbitrary, incomprehensible, illogical- and fairness
had nothing to do with it.
I was beaten only three
times – once for reading Biggles in first year Latin class, once for
cheekiness, and once for pillow-fighting, and frankly, I would have been
ashamed to have left school without having been caned. It was, however, quite
astoundingly painful. The only comparable agony in adulthood came when I fell
on rocks and broke three ribs.
Corporal punishment not
merely established a hierarchy of manhood; it also opened a window into the
world of serial abuse, the existence of which all of us at least suspected; and
some had experienced. At the prep school to my boarding school, boys were
routinely beaten till they bled. One master used to hold boys by their jaws at
a single arm’s length from the top of the Victorian bell-tower, and boys in my
dormitory would wake up screaming in terror at the memory.
With every lash of the
cane, we were reminded of the possible existence of a world of totalitarian
brutality which could spring into existence with little provocation. And
privately, we were all resolved to endure whatever terror and violence came our
way in uncomplaining silence. Our determination to keep our home lives and our
school lives apart was total. We would have endured just about any privation or
abuse rather than undergo parental intrusion or complaint into our
school-world. So victims always protected the abuser: that was part of the
perverse contract of our times.
That’ll Teach ’Em cannot
possibly comprehend such aspects of public school life. Instead, it is
introducing the anachronistic concept of co-education. This is fatuous. The
absence of girls was as much a defining a feature of the culture of English
public school as the threat and the reality of institutional violence. Trying
to capture that essence with girls and without flogging on “reality” television
is like making a series of programmes about apartheid, except with universal
suffrage and no townships.
Instead of dealing with the
contemporary realities, the programme seems set to deal with current obsessions
and prevalent myths, sex being the most obvious. Cassandra Jardine writing of
the series in The Telegraph last Friday gave an inadvertent clue. She
wondered how the boys (but not the girls) would take to the news that what she
quaintly called self-abuse was damaging. This merely reflects the current media
obsession with male masturbation, rather than female. If That’ll Teach ’Em were
to go back another 50 or so years, would a programme maker of 2003 dare to
brave modern feminist wrath by relaying Mary Wood-Allen’s solemn and public
warnings (in What A Young Girl Should Know, 1905) of the dangers of “the
solitary vice”, which caused girls to eat mustard, vinegar, clay, salt, chalk
and charcoal?
Other days, other ways: so
when we hear the producer talking American, and referring to the “tough love”
of his imagined public school of the past, we should worry. Public school was
without “love”: it was a power structure, in which violence, obedience and
rote-learning became second nature, all of which could none the less result in
blinding discoveries. Once one had grasped the beauty of grammar, language
opened up like a vast bejewelled warehouse: few discoveries in my entire life
equal the revelations which were liberated by that precious key.
That key was not cut in a
month: nor can modern, free-ranging minds even begin to resemble minds shaped
by remorseless daily routine of endless fact-acquisition and the parallel
threat of serious pain. You can put today’s hotel swipe-card into an old
mortice lock, and pretend the door will open, but you know it won't. Only the
most vapid televisual conceit of 2003 could propose otherwise. The past, you
see, was inhabited by Martians; and today’s young earthlings imitate us in
vain.
As published in
The Daily Telegraph, 27 July 2003.
Picture (Simon Warr poses
for publicity photo): Channel 4 (UK).
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